Continuing the Stranger Things theme and digging out stuff from the back of the closet -
Like the sister in Stranger Things, I too had a Trapper Keeper notebook. It was green. Inside was a blue folder (along with other colored folders). It held the D&D stuff. (The other folders held mundane things like math and english assignments.
I kept some of the original stuff. When we first played D&D, it was the boxed beginners set with the blue rule book. We did not have figures or fancy dice. We used paper cups filled with little chits of paper for our non-d6 dice roles; a d4 cup with four little pieces of paper numbered 1 through 4; a d20 with 20 chits.
Character sheets were hand-written affairs. Some of my adventure notes were typed on a manual Smith-Corona typewriter.
Battles took place in our heads or on graph paper. A copy of an early conflict is on the left in the picture below. On the right are variations of Tolkien's Elvish runes. I thought they were cool.
So yea. I saw the Trapper Keeper notebook in Stranger Things and am reminded of my 80s. I remember getting my hands on the original Monster Manual from a classmate and using lunch time to copy as many of the creatures as I could onto paper. No xerox or scanning. Good ole' #2 pencil and loose leaf paper. And then, Friday night, we fought them!
